Thanks for your castigation of the Vandal Wakley,1 which I have read this morning. The sound of him is as that of one “whose speech is of bullocks”;2 a sound disgraceful to your Commons House, called Honourable. You did well to rebuke him. Nay the “natural man” (whose thoughts
indeed are enmity to God) regrets rather that instead of the whip of polished reprimand, it had not been a right leathern dog- or horse-whip,
or solid American cowskin: but this, I suppose, the forms of your Hon. House would not permit. Mr Macaulay too finds that
his last-year's excursion was on the wrong tack; that even at the risk of smelling of the shop he had better take the common one. This Bill, not so bad a one, seems likely to pass. Thanks
for the day of small things.3—

I am here these five weeks,—you know on what mournful errand. For the last three weeks and more, I have been as nearly as
possible in perfect solitude; alone with my own ugly Self, with my own sorrows and sins which are ugly enough, and God's Universe
which is beautiful and terrible ever as of old. It is long since I had a time so like a Sabbath: full of sadness; but not
miserable, perhaps almost blessed rather. “Blessed are the Dead”:4 is it not even so?

This night is to be the last of that sort of existence. Tomorrow morning all bursts up into explosion of Packers, Carpenters
&c &c; in three days more we have no longer any habitation here. The place that once well knew us “Knows us no more again
at all forever.”5

Often in these silent spring days have I remembered where I was last year this time;6 and converted it all into the elegiac figure (very beautiful even so, and perhaps most beautiful so),—as, at any time, not to speak of this time, most things turn to elegy with me: what can I do? Unspoken elegy. This great old Earth, is she not built on silent Graves, overcanopied with silent Stars!7—

Perhaps in some ten days more I shall return to those pavements of yours; I look on them from this distance with a kind of
shudder. But the end of man is not a thought;8 not a manufacture of unspoken elegies. Allons [Let us go]!

My poor Wife has suffered, and still suffers, from one of the sorest wounds a human heart can experience here below. We have
but one Mother; no second is appointed us. If you ever went by Chelsea, it might be a kindness to call for my poor Jane.

Accept at any rate my salutation from the mountains; my blessing and best wishes always.

1. During debate on the copyright bill in the House of Commons, 6 April, Thomas Wakley (1795–1862; ODNB), M.P. for Finsbury and ed. of the Lancet, opposed any change in the existing law. In a long speech he asserted that, for the last forty years, authors had been paid
enough; that the old system had produced better works than any new one would; that formerly authors were not, as now, worshippers
of “the molten calf.” He maintained the much greater value of medical advances and inventions and asked why, if fourteen years
were long enough for a patent, a longer term should be allowed for literature. In his reply Milnes defended Wordsworth, whom
Wakley had ridiculed; denied that copyright raised book prices; and said that literary incomes could not be compared with
those of the leading men in medicine.

3. Zech. 4:10. In 1841 Macaulay had offended many writers by opposing Talfourd's proposal to extend copyright from twenty-eight years to life plus
sixty years. In this debate he moved an amendment to Lord Mahon's proposal that it should be for life plus twenty-five years,
wishing it to be either for life or for forty-two years, whichever was longer. Peel eventually carried his proposal for forty-two
years or life plus seven, whichever was the greater.